The success of the modern business enterprise depends heavily on the computing and communications infrastructure that supports it. This infrastructure is considered a strategic asset by businesses, and has changed dramatically over the years as a result of the evolution in data processing and telecommunications. Because of recent advances in computing and telecommunications, companies are rapidly adopting new ways of doing business, with the end result that mission critical applications and operations have moved onto the network and are increasingly dependent on new networking paradigms.
These new applications generally have some fundamental differences from earlier data applications. First, they demand much higher bandwidth because the amount of traffic generated by them is so much greater. Second, there is a greater need for network connectivity among a much larger end-user population. Where, in the past, the network simply connected internal, specialized functional areas, the modern network interconnects virtually everyone within the corporate structure. Traditional methods of connecting occasional users to the network involve the use of dial-up lines of relatively low speed, which are not satisfactory for meeting today's connectivity requirements.
Another characteristic of the modern business is that it often comprises multiple geographically dispersed locations. In addition, many firms permit or even encourage telecommuting. Newer network services, such as ATM, make these practices possible. In particular, ATM makes it possible for such far-flung enterprises to exchange information rapidly and effectively.
One example of the use of ATM technology is as part of a wide-area network (WAN) that is used to interconnect and seamlessly integrate multiple remote local area networks (LANs) to form an enterprise intranet. One advantage of this scheme is that the WAN is transparent, and the distributed LANs function as a single LAN from the perspective of the end-user. However, there is a significant disadvantage to this scheme. Because the WAN is transparent, the managers of the LANs cannot diagnose faults within the WAN. Therefore, a LAN manager cannot determine whether a network fault lies within the LAN or within the WAN. Additionally, WAN reported faults cannot be correlated to the associated LAN components.